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Black and Brown Planets, edited by Isiah Lavender, III, signifies a timely exploration of the Western obsession with color in its analysis of the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore some of the possible worlds of science fiction (literature, television, and film) to lift blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre. In two sections, this collection considers the role that race and ethnicity plays in our visions of the future. The first section emphasizes the political elements of black identity portrayed in science fiction from Black America to the vast reaches of interstellar space framed by racial history. Analysis of Indigenous science fiction in the second section addresses the effects of colonization, assists in discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovers ancestral traditions in order to adapt in a post-Native-apocalyptic world. Likewise, the second section explores the affinity between science fiction and subjectivity in Latin American cultures from the role of science and industrialization to the effects of being and moving between two cultures, effectively alienated as a response to political repression. Black and Brown Planets considers how alternate racial futurisms reconfigure our sense of viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny and, therefore, adds more color to this otherwise monochrome genre.

John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac’s life they were—in Holmes’s words—“Brother-Souls.” Both were neophyte novelists, hungry for literary fame but just as hungry to find a new way of responding to their experiences in a postwar American society that for them had lost its direction. Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term “Beat Generation” to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. This book is the chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and Holmes’s life. From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac’s wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. Struggling to find a form for the novel he intended to write, Kerouac climbed the stairs to the apartment in midtown Manhattan where Holmes lived with his wife, to read the pages of Holmes’s manuscript for the novel Go as they left the typewriter. With the pages of Holmes’s final chapter still in his mind, he was at last able to crack his own writing dilemma. In a burst of creation in April 1951 he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road, the author of which was close to Holmes for more than a decade.

The statement, “The Civil Rights Movement changed America,” though true, has become something of a cliche. This book seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. Each of these writers published significant works prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of the following year, making it possible to trace their evolution in reaction to these events. The work these writers crafted in response to the upheaval of the day, from Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?, to Mailer’s “The White Negro” to Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” to Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, reveal much about their own feeling in the moment, even as they contribute to the national conversation that centered on race and democracy. By examining these works closely, the author posits the argument that these writers significantly shaped discourse on civil rights as the movement was occurring, but in ways that—intentionally or not—often relied upon a notion of the relative innocence of the South with regard to racial affairs, and on a construct of African Americans as politically and/or culturally naive. As these writers grappled with race and the myth of southern nobility, their work developed in ways that were simultaneously sympathetic of, and condescending to, black intellectual thought.

The anthology asks: What social and political impact is created by the Steampunk dimension of film, television, fashion, and decoration? How does Steampunk both reflect and shape social attitudes and predispositions? To what extent does Steampunk provide the grounding for subcultures? How is Steampunk used in political appeals? Its essays address the way that Steampunk culture generates its own rhetorical norms, its own communicative patterns and structures, at the same time that it generates a lexicon that becomes part of the larger rhetoric of popular and political culture.

This book traces the development of a Left feminist consciousness as women became more actively involved in the American Left during and immediately following World War II. It argues that women writers on the Left drew on the rhetoric of antifascism to critique the cultural and ideological aspects of women’s oppression. In Left journals during World War II, women writers outlined the dangers of fascist control for women and argued that the fight against fascism must also be about ending women’s oppression. After World War II, they continued to use this antifascist framework to call attention to the ways in which the emerging domestic ideology in the United States bore a frightening resemblance to the fascist repression of women in Nazi Germany. This critique of American domestic ideology emphasized the ways in which black and working-class women were particularly affected, and extended to an examination of women’s roles in personal and romantic relationships. Underlying this critique was the belief that representations of women in American culture were part of the problem. To counter these dominant cultural images, women writers on the Left depicted female activists in contemporary antifascist and anticolonial struggles, or turned to the past for historical role models in the labor, abolitionist, and antisuffrage movements. This depiction of women as models of agency and liberation challenged some of the conventions about femininity in the postwar era.

Larry Brown was unique among writers who started their careers in the late twentieth century. Unlike most of them—his friends Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Rick Bass, Kaye Gibbons, among others—he was neither a product of a writing program, nor did he teach at one. In fact, he did not even attend college. His innate talent, his immersion in the life of north Mississippi, and his determination led him to national success. Drawing on excerpts from numerous letters and material from interviews with family members and friends, this book is a biography of a landmark southern writer. It explores the cultural milieu of Oxford, Mississippi, and the writers who influenced Brown, including William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews, and Cormac McCarthy. The book covers Brown’s history in Mississippi, the troubled family in which he grew up, and his boyhood in Tula and Yocona, Mississippi, and in Memphis, Tennessee. It relates stories from Brown’s time in the Marines, his early married life—which included sixteen years as an Oxford fireman—and what he called his “apprenticeship” period, the eight years during which he was teaching himself to write publishable fiction. The book examines Brown’s years as a writer: the stories and novels he wrote, his struggles to acclimate himself to the fame his writing brought him, and his many trips outside Yocona, where he spent the last thirty years of his life. It concludes with a discussion of A Miracle of Catfish.

Larry Brown (1951–2004) is noted for his subjects—rural life, poverty, war, and the working class—and his spare, gritty style. His oeuvre spans several genres and includes acclaimed novels (Dirty Work, Joe, Father and Son, The Rabbit Factory, and A Miracle of Catfish), short story collections (Facing the Music, Big Bad Love), memoir (On Fire), and essay collections (Billy Ray’s Farm). At the time of his death, Brown was considered to be one of the finest exemplars of minimalist, raw writing of the contemporary South. This book considers the writer’s full body of work, placing it in the contexts of southern literature, Mississippi writing, and literary work about the working class. Collectively, the chapters explore such subjects as Brown’s treatment of class politics, race and racism, the aftereffects of the Vietnam War on American culture, the evolution of the South from a plantation-based economy to a postindustrial one, and male–female relations. The book discusses the role of Brown’s mentors—Ellen Douglas and Barry Hannah—in shaping his work, as well as Brown’s connection to such writers as Harry Crews and Dorothy Allison. It is one of the first critical studies of a writer whose depth and influence mark him as one of the most well-regarded Mississippi authors.

Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture is a collection of essays that seeks to consider gothic horror texts for children with the respect such texts deserve, weighing the multitude of benefits they can provide for young readers and viewers. It refuses to write off the horror genre as campy, trite, or deforming, instead recognizing that many of the children’s books and films categorized as “scary” are among those most widely read/viewed by children and young adults. It also considers how adult horror has been domesticated by children’s literature and culture, with authors and screenwriters turning that which was once utterly horrifying into safe, funny, and delightful books and films, along with the impetus behind such re-envisioning of the adult horror novel or film as something appropriate for the young. Especially today, when dark novels, shows, and films targeted toward children and young adults are proliferating with wild abandon, understanding the methods by which such texts have traditionally operated, as well as how those methods have been challenged, abandoned, and appropriated in recent years, becomes all the more crucial.

The Cold War was unique in the way films, books, television shows, colleges and universities, and practices of everyday life were enlisted to create American political consensus. This coercion fostered a seemingly hegemonic, nationally unified perspective devoted to spreading a capitalist, socially conservative notion of freedom throughout the world to fight Communism. This book traces the historical contours of this manufactured consent by considering the ways in which authors, playwrights, and directors participated in, responded to, and resisted the construction of Cold War discourses. It argues that a fugitive resistance to the status quo emerged as writers and activists variously fled into exile, went underground, or grudgingly accommodated themselves to the new spirit of the times. To this end, the author examines work by a wide swath of creators, including essayists W. E. B. Du Bois and F. O. Matthiessen; novelists Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, and Paul Bowles; playwright Arthur Miller; poet Sylvia Plath; and filmmakers Elia Kazan and John Ford. The book explores how writers and artists created works that went against mainstream notions of liberty, and which offered alternatives to the false dichotomy between capitalist freedom and totalitarian tyranny. These complex responses and the era they reflect had, and continue to have, profound effects on American and international cultural and intellectual life, as can be seen in the connections the author makes between past and present.